Comments (1)

By pfuetz, June 2, 2006 07:08

I’m highly involved in provisioning tasks (we call all that “N1”) in the german market, and what I have been learning during the last 3-4 years from talking to customers and doing PoCs in different accounts can be summed up quickly as follows:

• Larger accounts tend to not decide, because a decision towards one single product puts them into the hands of a single vendor.
• Larger accounts also tend to not decide, because their organisations are larger, and deciding to do provisioning also might need to be prepared by internal organisational “adoptions” or “adaptations”.
• Larger accounts also tend to have a “dual-vendor” strategy, which prohibits a decision for a single vendor in the arena of datacenter provisioning. As long, as there are no real interchangable products (and I think, we all will wait long on these!), a change from one provisioning tool to another will always be a large re-implementation. The sad thing here is, that the companies still live the old, sneaker-net way, and will not benefit from the advantages of provisioning. Remember: Even doing it with one vendor will benefit in overall cost savings, and even a later change would not be as expensive as perceived, because the structural and organizational changes will be re-usable!

But: This only applies to companies, that want to start to provision the complete datacenter. With many large accounts we are doing provisioning, but this is for smaller pieces of their environment. And that works very well, if it is contained in the small “sandboxes”.

• Smaller companies on the other hand are normally more willing to go this route, as they can adopt quicker to changes, and so we see larger adoption here. And: These smaller companies are willing to go and also are going the complete way. Remember: although these companies are smaller, the amount of work needed to be done is not smaller, if we look at the configuration and setup of the tools.

What’s your feeling w.r.t. these topics?

Are you willing to start provisioning today?

Feedback welcome!

Comments (1)

By pfuetz, June 2, 2006 05:59

Last week, again, was my birthday, and as the day after that was a public holiday, my girlfriend surprised me with tickets to a performance of Wagner’s opera Parsifal at Opera Frankfurt (check:http://www.oper-frankfurt.de/saison/2005_2006/seiten/premieren/parsifal.html).

That day was a rainy day, so we both were really happy, that she did decide to spend that public holiday in the opera instead of in the open…;-)

To make it short:

We both highly recommend that!

Two years ago I had been to Baden-Baden to the highly acclaimed performance of Parsifal by Nikolaus Lehnhoff, conducted by Kent Nagano (check, for example: http://www.hampsong.com/discography/discography.php?id=C0_37_16). I went there for Thomas Hampson as Amfortas (as you can derive from the link), and loved it.

Next week we will be back to Baden-Baden to see Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s version of Lohengrin (sadly without Thomas Hampson).

To compare these two Parsifal performances, we did watch the DVD (which I really can recommend), in order to prepare ourselfes (and my girlfriend, who didn’t know this opera before), so we went to Frankfurt well prepared.

So, were did we see the differences?

First: In Frankfurt we had Julia Juon as Kundry. In Baden-Baden it was Waltraud Meier. Although the world seems to value Waltraud as better, we both agreed, that Julia was much better. This is attributed to the fact, that Julia has more volume in the deeper registers, and as Kundry is a person, that “suffers” from long-evity, and the incapability of dying, that possibility to perform sadness and being tired by expressing it in deep and low tones, made her superior to Waltraud.

Second: In Frankfurt the scenary was not that dark and black as in Baden-Baden. That made for more moving feelings. Still: That sadnees in the scenary in Baden-Baden was intentionally so. In Baden-Baden, the Gral (Holy Grail)-scene in the first movement was missing some of the glamour (which Lehnhoff did intentionally), but at least I valued the more “traditional” setup in Frankfurt more. Helping here was the voice of Titurel, because it had not been put into the echo/background, but still remained on stage, at the table, and Magnus Baldvinsson has a really great voice! This together made for the most moving putting-in-scenary of this episode I’ve ever seen or listened to.

The second and the third movement didn’t fall short, so, as stated above, we can really recommend that performance. And the orchester was great. The only sad thing to say (but that’s also true for the Baden-Baden version) is, that the bells were electronic, and not real.

Comments (1)

By pfuetz, June 1, 2006 09:36

We recently had a longer email discussion about the influence of provisioning tools like our N1 portfolio onto the ITIL disciplines. (N.B.: I’m not ITIL-certified, so I might seem a little bit biased.) The discussion started around the following email w.r.t. an annoucement:

From the itSMF International Board Report:

“itSMFI has agreed to endorse an initiative by a group of software vendors (BMC Software, CA, Fujitsu, HP and IBM) which plans to develop an open, industry-wide specification for sharing information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) and other data repositories. The group plans to submit a draft specificatino to an industry standards organisation later this year.”

Does anyone know more about this?

This discussion was leading to the role of N1 P1 and N1 P2 (check Dave Levy’s blog for more info on these upcoming versions of the N1 product portfolio) and on the role of CMDB’s in these environments. Let me quote my colleague Jorgen Skogstad:

In my simple world: N1 SM, N1 SPS, P1, P2.. and similar ‘stuff’ are all CMDBs (aka Configuration Management DataBases).

Continuing later on, he opened the following question:

IMHO technology will always be just technology and can be applied in many ways. Some good, some bad. The same applies when taking technology to achieve an efficient IT operation; easier said than done. If it was easy, why are our customers struggling of deliver business aligned services at an efficient cost? Why are they even going down the outsourcing route.. so and so forth. :)

In simple terms; what would happen if you in _theory_ had 100 Sun systems running 100*4096 containers? That equals 409600 “systems” that each individually demand maintenance and support. Couple that with the service complexities running on top of it; for instance full blown application life-cycle management. Without a properly defined model to approach that problem you will inevitably run into problems.

Didier Kirszenberg then made a swing and stated:

Most customer lauch their ITIL initiative foccusing on “Help Desk” and CMDB. They try to fill their CMDB by inventory process. This can be efficient for infrastrucure but not for the fast moving applications (using photo to capture a movie). N1 SPS is maybe the only tool in the market able to do the “application release mangement” and with his central database bring to the product choosen as the unique and central CMDB the exact view or the application asset at all time.

Jorgen then replied:

Didier,

I agree with you; SPS is not a CMDB as per se. It performs more the function of the DSL in ITIL terms, but then again the DSL is a functional part of the CMDB. In any case, I’ve written up two papers on the topic of ‘applied provisioning’ + ‘the itil dsl in an agile infrastructure environment’. Sort of states the same that you’re mentioning beneath. If you’re interested, have a look at them. You may find them here:

http://www.skogstad.com/papers/AUUG-2005-Applied-application-and-service-provisioning-0210905-FINAL.pdf

http://www.skogstad.com/papers/The-ITIL-DSL-in-an-agile-infrastructure-environment.pdf

Then I jumped in:

Folks,

but still, I do not like us to “reduce” the value of N1 SPS (and the upcoming N1 P2 product) to the “Release Management” part.

If you use a release management tool, and the release management does keep a record, it automatigally becomes a CMDB, right?

Doing it the “back way” by trying to focus on “gathering, what’s there” in order to “populate an inventory” might be a way to “handle the past”, but is this really, what we want?

Or, to turn it around:

Does a car manufacturer really want to keep a record of every lightbulb in every switch in every dashboard in order to service the “light switch”? Or is the “light switch” the thing he wants to be able to “replace” as a total, or even the “switch board” as a complete unit?

As such, the “gathering, what’s there” approach might be wrong…

Thought-provoking?

Jorgen answered:

Agree; in ITIL terms SPS fills a number of roles. It facilitates Release Management, Configuration Management, Change Management .. but also is central in the CMDB + DSL. It does not “implement” either one in it’s entirety, but it provides an engine to manage them efficiently. If you look to my ‘applied’ paper, that’s what it is stating. The other paper states how the DSL in ITIL terms should function in an agile infrastructure environment which is what SM, SPS, P2 … etc .. provides, right.

We then turned to the definition of the CIs (configuration items), and Jorgen continued:

Hence if you are provisioning systems, services, applications etc through SPS, SM etc that _are_ in fact CI’s that can fail, be patched, brought down, requested for ‘change’ and so forth you would want the CMDB (aka for example Remedy) to have state information about that CI. Without a proper history of that, the Servicedesk staff and other users of the ITIL processes will not be able to perform their work ..

In simple terms; to have an efficient ‘enabling ITSM’ CMDB system it has to know about all CI’s out there. This includes servers, switches, routers and so forth, but more importantly applications, services and aggregate services. They fail, they are managed, changed, developed and so forth. So, unless state information and history is available within the ITIL processes you immediately have a problem of communication and ownership. :)

.. hence the importance of the itSMFI initiative. If it would be possible to tie “all” systems together, this would aleviate the problem and enable a more consistent way of managing an IT environment.

My main idea was:

If we do use provisioning tools to provision complete infrastructures, and if we have a “compare” feature inside these tools, that can simply find “deviations” to the “specifications”, do we then really need to have a tool to “gather, what’s there”? Because if we determine, that there are deviations, we can simply “re-provision”, right?

I need to leave out the further discussion, because it got to specific to upcoming products, but rest assured, we address the issues!

Simply put: “Our goal is to offer a pragmatic implementation of a CMDB.” (Doan Nguyen)

Feedback is welcome!

Comments (1)

By pfuetz, May 24, 2005 08:02

Today is my Birthday, so I thought, I might use it to start a Blog. You might be wondering, why that?

The simple reason for that is the fact, that I try to work, but too many people pass by to congratulate (and that on a non-special birthday, like the 41st (mathematically speaking, it’s the 42nd, because the day I was born is the first, finishing the first year hits the second birthday, et.al.)), so I can not do real work. So, in order to at least do something, I thought about starting my Blog.

It’s a nice fact after more then 7 years with Sun, that so many want to come by and shake hands.

And after that long period of living on this planet, Sun is the company that I’m working for for the longest time. Tell’s me something about this company (or the others before Sun).

Before I dive into more specific things later on in this blog, I’d like to give you an idea of the person behind this blog.

As you can derive, I’m 41 now, being born in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, raised in a suburb of Wiesbaden, where I finished school in 1983. I studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Darmstadt, where I finished with my Diploma in January 1990. I then joined a spin-off of the University, the so-called Zentrum fuer Graphische Datenverarbeitung. Some of you might know, that the University of Darmstadt is famous for its contributions to the world of computer graphics. Prof. Encarnacao is among the three renowned professors in the world. I was working on projects with multiple companies, the most notable was Honeywell, where I did help in building the building automation system for the then new airport in Munich. After five years I was transfered to another spin-off, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, where I joined the datacenter operations team. I was responsible for setting up the 3rd WWW-conference (the one, that gave birth to java!), and handled all the stuff from web-master, post-master, and all Sun Systems there. As part of my job, I participated in several Sun beta-tests, most notably the Solaris 2.6 Beta-test. I wrote an article about that in german’s iX periodical, which led to Sun’s interest in me. I took no chances at that time and joined Sun at Feb 1st, 1998 as a project engineer in the Professional Services Organisation.

Inside Sun I’ve been working on far to many projects to list here. Main topics where (and still are): HA (aka SunCluster), and lately N1.

I’m a Datacenter Ambassador, Solution Architect, Member of the CETC (Customer Engineering Technical Council) in the Datacenter Practice of the now called Client Solutions Organisation in Germany.